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The home doesn’t announce its upgrades the way a phone does. Progress shows up as a battery that recharges in about ten minutes, a wall paint that’s EPA-registered to kill germs, and a shower that reuses the water it just heated. For our second annual Home of the Future Awards, we evaluated dozens of new products and selected those that use new or clever technology to do something that actually matters. They improve daily life, solve a real problem, make a home more accessible, or waste less of everything. We’re not quite living like Tony Stark just yet, but we’re getting there.
The Modern Backyard
Best Propane Fire Pit
Solo Stove Infinity Flame Propane Fire Pit $599.99
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Propane fire pits usually produce a stiff, decorative ring of flame. Solo Stove’s first gas pit uses a dual-burner design with the same precision-airflow engineering as its smokeless wood stoves, and the result is a flame that rises and swirls like a real wood fire. It puts out 72,000 BTU for more than 5.5 hours on a standard 20-pound tank. You get the campfire effect without smoke in your eyes or embers on the deck, and it shuts off with a knob.
Best Mosquito Defense
Thermacell LIV 2.0 Smart System $1,746 (3-repeller kit)
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The LIV system wires cast-aluminum repellers around the patio on low-voltage cable and heat-diffuses an EPA-registered, scent-free repellent on a schedule you set from the app. The system eschews fogging services, candles, and intrusive scents. The 2.0 generation doubles the network to ten repellers and roughly 3,000 square feet of coverage, monitors refill levels remotely, and takes voice commands. It’s mosquito control as infrastructure rather than a standalone gadget.
Best Self-Turning Pizza Oven
Ooni Koda 2 Max Rotating Stone Bundle $1,649
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Even the best home pizza oven punishes a distracted cook. The edge facing the flame chars while the back stays pale, and it happens in a hurry thanks to the high temperatures. Ooni’s Koda 2 Max fixes that with a motorized baking stone that turns the pizza for you. It’s driven from its rim rather than a center pivot, so it won’t wobble or stall under a loaded peel. A LiDAR module starts and stops the spin when you wave a hand or a peel past it. The 24-inch stone bakes a 20-inch New York pie, or two 12-inch Neapolitans at once. Turning the pie was the last manual skill between a novice and an even, restaurant-style bake, and this takes it off your hands.
The Smart Kitchen
Best Superautomatic Espresso Machine
De'Longhi PrimaDonna Aromatic $2,499.95
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Most superautomatic espresso machines grind the same way for every bean you feed them. The PrimaDonna Aromatic is De’Longhi’s first with fully integrated bean-to-cup adaptation. The feedback loop includes a burr grinder that monitors extraction performance and adjusts grind size, dose, and temperature in real time as beans age or change. A dedicated cold-extraction path pulls cold brew in under three minutes. We’ve already run one through a full review at PopSci, and the adaptive system is the reason this machine earns its price.
Best Microwave
Panasonic NN-SF57RM Flatbed Microwave $429.95
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American microwaves still spin a plate, which wastes the corners of the cavity and leaves a cold ring through the middle of leftovers. Panasonic’s flatbed design drops the turntable, moving energy across a flat floor big enough for a full dinner plate, while its Genius Sensor 2.0 reads the humidity rising off the food and sets power and time on its own. Reheating stops being a guess you have to correct twice. A pull-down, oven-style door and inverter power round out a box that’s especially useful in small spaces.
Water & Plumbing
Best Leak Shutoff
Moen Flo Smart Water Monitor and Shutoff $675.99
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One device on the main supply line watches flow, pressure, and temperature for the whole house. Moen’s FloSense software learns your normal water patterns and closes a motorized ball valve when something looks wrong. A daily pressure test catches leaks as small as one drop per minute, Moen says, anywhere in the plumbing system. Core protection runs without a subscription, and several insurers knock money off your premium for installing one because water-damage claims are that common.
Best Water Heater
Rheem ProTerra Hybrid Heat Pump Water Heater from $1,279
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A water heater is the appliance you forget about until one floods a basement. Rheem’s ProTerra is a hybrid heat-pump water heater. It pulls warmth from the surrounding air to heat water at roughly a third the energy of a standard electric tank. A built-in LeakGuard valve can sense a leak at the tank or its fittings and shut off the water supply before the puddle becomes a big problem. It pairs the category’s biggest efficiency gain with protection against the exact failure homeowners dread, and Wi-Fi alerts flag trouble from the app. The sticker price is high, but a federal tax credit can soften the blow.
Best Outdoor Faucet Upgrade
Aquor Hot+Cold Hydrant $410
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The outdoor spigot hasn’t changed since your grandparents’ house. Aquor’s stainless hydrant taps both hot and cold lines and blends them with a single-dial ceramic cartridge, so the hose runs at bath temperature for dog washing, car detailing, or an outdoor shower. The vacuum-sealed quick-connect self-drains every time you unplug the hose, which is what keeps it from bursting in January.
Floor Care & Cleaning
Best Robot Vacuum-Mop for Hidden Messes
Shark PowerDetect UV Reveal from $1,299.99
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Shark calls this the first robot vacuum and mop to combine UV light detection with an RGB camera, and the pairing finds dried, invisible messes, then scrubs them with its HyperSonic mopping system and verifies removal before moving on. The sanitizing, bagless base station handles the aftermath. You don’t want to find out about a forgotten juice spill by stepping in it.
Best Chemical-Free Floor Cleaner
iRobot Roomba Electro Plus $399.99
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Despite the Roomba badge, this one doesn’t drive itself. It’s a cordless wet-dry stick you push, and iRobot’s version electrolyzes plain tap water into a disinfecting solution as you clean. It achieves a 99.99 percent germ-kill claim with no chemicals to buy, store, or rinse away. When you’re done cleaning, the ThermaClean dock heat-washes, sanitizes, and dries the roller afterward. Households with crawling babies and chemical-averse cleaners get serious disinfection from the faucet.
Climate, Air & Comfort
Best Heat Pump
Quilt Ductless Heat Pump from $6,499 per zone installed
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Quilt’s new three-zone system claims the best efficiency of any three-zone ductless heat pump sold (SEER2 25.3), holds 100 percent of rated heating at -5°F and 88 percent at -13°F, and modulates each room’s head down to 2,210 BTU, a whisper. The deep-throttling trick keeps temperatures steady instead of cycling. Millimeter-wave sensors in each head notice when a room empties and set it back automatically. The indoor units are under eight inches tall and don’t look like hotel equipment, which matters more than the industry admits.
Best Room-by-Room Fix
Flair Smart Vent $129 per vent (Puck 2 sensor $124)
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Central HVAC treats a whole floor as one room, which is why the upstairs bedroom is always five degrees off. Flair’s motorized registers open and close individually, steered by Puck room sensors, redistributing air from a single-zone system without touching the ductwork. The new Puck 2 adds an e-paper display and infrared control of 200-plus brands of mini-splits and window units, so it runs the whole mongrel HVAC household. Built-in pressure safeguards keep closed vents from straining the blower. It’s the $129-per-room version of a $5,000 zoning retrofit.
Best Everyday Air Purifier
Coway Airmega Mighty2 $269.99
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The original AP-1512HH Mighty spent a decade as the default recommendation in air purifiers, including ours. The sequel cleans up to 1,800 square feet per hour on 56 watts and adds a laser sensor that reads PM1, PM2.5, and PM10 as actual numbers. That combination of proven filtration and real particulate readouts is why it steps straight into the same default slot.
Power & Energy
Best Portable Power Station
Goal Zero Yeti 1500 (6th Gen) $1,499.95
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Goal Zero rebuilt its best-known power station around lithium-iron-phosphate chemistry: 1,505 watt-hours rated for 4,000 charge cycles (roughly 10 years of service life) with a 2,000-watt inverter and a 0-to-80 charge in under an hour. Other brands got to LFP first, but this is the redesign that brings the durability math to the brand most people actually find at REI. Plus, it’s easy to lug around, which is crucial for a box you want to take camping.
Best Induction Range for Electrification
Copper Charlie Induction Range $5,999
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Charlie is an induction range with a 5 kWh battery inside, which allows the stove to sip from a standard 120-volt outlet at 12 amps. It discharges fast for four 2.8 kW burners and turbo preheat, so swapping out a gas range doesn’t require a 240-volt line (or the electrician’s invoice that goes with it). Electrification’s biggest hidden cost is the wiring, and this appliance simply routes around it.
Best Smart Electrical Panel
SPAN Panel about $3,500 plus installation
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The breaker box is the last dumb appliance in an electrified house. SPAN’s panel meters and switches every circuit individually, so the app can shed the EV charger or the water heater to stay under a 100-amp service. It sidesteps a utility service upgrade that can run five figures and stretches a backup battery further by triaging what stays on.
Home Protection
Best Electrical-Fire Early Warning
Ting Electrical Fire Prevention Sensor $99 for the first year
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Most electrical fires announce themselves weeks early as micro-arcing: tiny sparks inside damaged wiring that no breaker catches. Ting plugs into a single outlet and samples the home’s voltage waveform about 30 million times per second, using signature detection to spot arcing anywhere in the house or in anything plugged into it. When it confirms a hazard, the service dispatches a licensed electrician and covers up to $1,000 of the fix. It’s $49 a year after the first, and insurers including Nationwide and State Farm hand them out free.
Best Wildfire-Ready Decking
Trex Refuge PVC Decking about $115 per 16-foot board
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Refuge is cellular PVC rather than the wood-plastic composite in the rest of Trex’s line, and it hits Class A flame spread under ASTM E84 plus the extended 30-minute ignition-resistance standard (ASTM E2768). Those specs make it viable in wildland-urban interface code zones where ordinary composite decking is banned. It launched in January in Western markets with a 50-year residential warranty.
Best Wildfire Defense System
Frontline Wildfire Defense System from about $15,000 installed
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Frontline installs the system with its own crews in California, Colorado, and Texas. It mounts sprayers on the eaves and rotors on the roof, and when its satellite fire tracking puts a wildfire within about seven miles, the system alerts your phone and starts wetting the house and a 15-foot perimeter with water mixed with a Forest Service-approved Class A foam. The controller carries Wi-Fi, cellular, and satellite links with battery backup, and switches to pool or tank water if municipal pressure drops so it works mid-evacuation, when you’re not there. The company reports that 96 percent of the 61 Frontline-equipped homes in the January 2025 LA fires survived.
Building & Materials
Best Solar Roof
GAF Energy Timberline Solar ES 2 about $21–$24 per square foot installed
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Every other solar roof needs racking crews or specialty installers. GAF Energy’s ES 2 shingle goes on with a pneumatic nail gun, by the same crew laying the rest of the architectural shingles, and the current generation bumped output 23 percent to 57 watts per shingle. The roof stays one system with one warranty from the biggest roofing manufacturer in North America.
Paints & Coatings
Best Germ-Killing Paint
BEHR Copper Force Interior Paint $34.98 per gallon
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Copper kills microbes on contact; the trick is keeping copper ions active inside a dried paint film. Copper Force uses Corning’s Guardiant additive, a cuprous-oxide glass-ceramic, and carries an actual EPA registration, meaning the kill claims went through regulatory review rather than a marketing department. It dispatches 99.9 percent of viruses and bacteria within two hours, for up to six years, per the registration. Walls aren’t how most illness spreads, so temper expectations accordingly. But at $35 a gallon at The Home Depot, it’s the rare wonder-material that costs the same as the regular stuff.
Best Heat-Rejecting Paint
Cryo X CryoPaint $250 per gallon
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Passive daytime radiative cooling paints reflect sunlight and radiate heat in the 8-to-13-micron window where the atmosphere is transparent to dump warmth straight to the sky. Purdue’s famous ultra-white version still isn’t for sale; CryoPaint is the version you can actually order, and Cryo X claims coated surfaces run up to 15°F below air temperature with zero electricity. Boulder County and RMI are piloting it across a 34-unit affordable-housing complex this summer to test exactly that. The published literature typically shows 8 to 10 degrees of sub-ambient cooling, so treat the bigger number as the company’s own. The foundation is real, and so is the can.
Connected Living Room
Best Wireless TV
LG OLED evo W6 Wallpaper TV $5,499.99 (77-inch)
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The W6 is the world’s thinnest true wireless OLED: a 9-millimeter panel that mounts flush like a framed print, with every connection handled by the Zero Connect Box transmitting visually lossless 4K from about 30 feet away. The only cable on the wall is power. TVs have promised to disappear into the room for a decade, and this is the first one that mechanically delivers it.
Home Security & Access
Best UWB Deadbolt
Schlage Sense Pro Smart Deadbolt $399
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Geofence auto-unlock is a blunt instrument. It fires from the driveway, or the sidewalk, or occasionally the neighbor’s porch. Schlage’s Converge system uses ultra-wideband ranging against the phone in your pocket, computing speed and trajectory so the deadbolt throws precisely as you arrive at the door. It’s also Schlage’s first Matter-over-Thread lock, and when the roughly six-month battery finally dies, a USB-C port jump-starts it in seconds.
Best Home Security Cameras
Ring Retinal 4K Lineup 4K cameras from $199.99
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Ring rebuilt its cameras around a new imaging pipeline it calls Retinal Vision, with 4K flagships tuned for long-range detail (a lower-cost Retinal 2K tier starts at $59.99). Alongside it, Search Party uses AI matching across participating neighborhood cameras to find lost dogs, and it opened to all US users in February with no Ring hardware required. The lost-pet application is still the rare neighborhood-camera feature with an unambiguous beneficiary.
Smart Home Foundations
Best Smart Shades
SmartWings Motorized Shades from about $250 per shade
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Most motorized shades make you adopt the manufacturer’s hub, app, and cloud before the first sunrise automation. SmartWings builds Matter-over-Thread radios directly into the tube motor, so the shades pair straight into Apple Home, Google, Alexa, or Home Assistant and keep working entirely locally. An optional solar trickle panel tops off the battery, ending the recharge chore. Custom-sized, at roughly half of what the legacy brands charge.
Bath & Personal Care
Best Water-Saving Shower
Kohler Anthem EvoCycle $5,625 plus required shower base
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The EvoCycle starts your shower with fresh water, then closes the loop. Captured water is filtered and re-blended with a half-gallon of fresh, cutting consumption by up to 80 percent in Kohler’s best case, while ozone cleaning cycles sanitize the system between showers. Recirculating showers have existed at the eco-startup fringe; this is the first from a major US fixture brand.
Best Smart Toilet
TOTO Aurora WASHLET+ S7A $2,690
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TOTO’s newest flush architecture sequences gravity-driven water through a dual-tank, dual-valve design: rim wash and siphon-jet action fired in stages, working with TOTO’s TORNADO-style flushing dynamics to extend cleaning coverage on 1.0 to 1.28 gallons. Integrated bidet, pre-misted bowl, and TOTO’s glaze come along as standard features. Neorest owners have had versions of this experience for $7,000-plus; the Aurora lands it at a third of that through US dealers.
Best Smart Bidet
Eau by TUSHY $1,599
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The brand that talked America into bidets built a full smart toilet aimed at the gap between $200 seat attachments and $5,000 status fixtures. The lid opens as you approach, a foaming cleanser preps the bowl at the press of a button so mess doesn’t stick, the nozzle sterilizes itself with UV for three minutes after every wash, and a foot-kick button keeps hands off everything.
Accessibility & Aging in Place
Best Stove Safety Device
iGuard for Electric Stoves $549
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Unattended cooking is a leading cause of home fires, and the risk increases with age. iGuard plugs in between the outlet and an electric stove and watches the kitchen with radar precise enough to tell a person sitting still from an empty room. Walk away too long and it warns, then kills power to the burners. Come back and cooking resumes. The core protection needs no subscription and no Wi-Fi. It removes the scariest object in the house from the worry list without taking away the cooking.
Family Hub
Best Kids' Routine Device
Skylight Buddy $139
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Buddy is a small screen that coaches kids aged roughly 4 to 10 through their routines: visual task sequences, timers, and reminders that externalize the executive function young kids (and especially neurodivergent kids) are still building, with no camera and no microphone. Parents stop being the nag; the routine belongs to the kid.
Garden & Outdoor Tech
Best Smart Sprinkler
Irrigreen 3.0 Smart Sprinkler System from $2,089
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Conventional sprinkler zones spray circles at your rectangular lawn and hit the driveway with whatever’s left over. Irrigreen’s robotic heads meter 16 individual streams to match the mapped shape of the yard, which the company says cuts usage up to 50 percent, and the controller adjusts run times to local weather on its own. The 3.0 generation, built in Wisconsin since last August, adds self-flushing nozzles and field-repairable parts. One head covers what used to take a whole zone of hardware.
Best Food Recycler
Mill Plus $999
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Mill’s bin dries and grinds the day’s scraps overnight with dual augers rated at 288 pounds of force, leaving shelf-stable grounds a carbon filter keeps odorless for up to a year. The Plus model adds an onboard scale that weighs every pound diverted, which helps motivate use with gamification instead of shame. An optional $192-a-year pickup service hauls the grounds off to become chicken feed. Whole Foods is putting Mill’s technology in stores starting next year, which is a good sign for longevity.
Outdoor Robotics
Best Robot Mower for Hills
MAMMOTION LUBA 3 AWD from $2,399
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Robot mowers still mostly fail at the same two things: hills and precision. The LUBA 3’s four independently driven wheels climb 80 percent grades, and its Tri-Fusion navigation combines LiDAR, RTK positioning, and camera vision for claimed centimeter-level accuracy. It does all of that without a boundary wire. The full sensor stack rides the higher trims, so spec the model to the yard. For lawns that were previously robot-proof, this is the machine that changes the answer.
Yard & Outdoor Power
Best Cordless Tool Battery System
STIHL ALLPRO Battery System
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STIHL’s next-generation battery platform is built on tabless cells. Energy flows across the cell’s whole surface instead of squeezing through small metal tabs, which cuts internal resistance enough to deliver consistently higher power at any charge level. The batteries can pick up an 80 percent recharge in as little as ten minutes with the fast charger (nine in STIHL’s international spec). Despite that speed, each battery is rated for up to 3,000 cycles, roughly a decade of daily charging, before it degrades. The Performance-series packs carry those headline claims, and they work across STIHL’s 60-plus existing AP tools. This is the infrastructure that makes gas-to-battery conversion practical, for pro crews first and the rest of us by compatibility.
Best Quiet Leaf Blower
Tone Outdoors T1 Leaf Blower $599
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Tone is the consumer arm of Whisper Aero, an aerospace company that builds ultra-quiet electric propulsors for aircraft. The T1 is that exact technology pointed at leaves. The company claims 52 decibels at 50 feet at peak output, measured to the ANSI standard, while moving 880 CFM at 150 mph from a 7.4-pound handheld; its pitch is 80 percent quieter and 60 percent more powerful than leading gas handhelds.
Furniture & Ergonomics
Best Active Ergonomic Chair
LiberNovo Omni $1,099
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The Omni is a powered chair whose chip-controlled backrest moves with your body in real time. Sixteen pivot joints and eight adaptive panels of dynamic support replace the static recline every conventional ergonomic chair offers. It began as the most-funded ergonomic-chair campaign in Kickstarter history and has shipped since October 2025, with an expanded line (including a big-and-tall Maxis from $809) launched this year.
Workshop & Fabrication
Best Measuring Tool
REEKON T1 Tomahawk Digital Tape Measure $259.99
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The REEKON T1 Tomahawk reads the blade’s position electronically and shows the number on an e-paper display, stores more than 1,000 measurements, throws a green alignment laser, and sends readings over Bluetooth to your phone or cut list. The math that causes miscuts happens on the tool instead of in your head, so you don’t have to worry about mixing up stud distances or other crucial calculations.
Best Power Tool Battery Upgrade
Ryobi 18V ONE+ EDGE 8Ah Tabless Battery $229
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Tabless lithium cells replace the single foil tab inside each cell with a continuous current collector, slashing internal resistance, which means less heat, more sustained power, and an 80 percent charge in as little as 35 minutes. Milwaukee and DeWalt rolled the technology out as a pro-tier flex; Ryobi just put it on ONE+, the 300-tool platform sitting in more American garages than any other. The battery in your drill now shares its core architecture with the one in a Cybertruck. That trickle-down took about four years.
